YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

What a singular achievement Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is, to be genuinely unlike any other film. And a singular vision on the part of Bassam Tariq, who wrote and directed. Where else are you going to find a tense action-drama with violent grudges and retaliation, presented with deeply devout, Muslim characters?

Ultimately, this is a film about faith—and it very much acknowledges other faiths as well, and is surprisingly respectful of them. Recently widowed Latif (Mahershala Ali) and his three children live in an apartment complex where teenage Fatiha (Adia) hangs out with neighbors who are all devout Mormons. Eventually Latif gets mixed up with an evangelical preacher, Pastor Hwan (John Cho—looking, forgive me, a little ripe) who is convinced he needs to “liberate” people from the porn industry—including Hatty (Abubakr Ali), the son of Mike (Laith Nakli), the Arabic man who has a history of hiring Latif for hit jobs.

It is one of these hit jobs that opens the film, after an introductory reading of the Islamic story behind the film’s title. The film later returns to the characters we first heard reading and listening to that story, but in the meantime we see Latif dispatch a faceless man with some effort in a public restroom, which turns out to be out of both working faucets and paper towels. But within minutes after this scene, we learn that Latif’s wife has recently died, leaving him with his aforementioned teenage daughter; an preadolescent boy, Qadir (Jahleel Kamara); and a baby still used to breast milk who will not accept formula.

There is only a limited amount of pumped breast milk left, so Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother quickly becomes a race against time, as Latif desperately tries to find breast milk for his baby, from multiple sources. As a parent, this is Latif’s driving motivation whatever else is going on—and a lot else is going on. He’s trying to maintain family stability. And Mike is so pissed about Pastor Hwan’s baseless accusation that Hatty is using his porn studio as a front for human trafficking that he insists Latif dispatch him. He doesn’t care about Latif’s many other concerns at the moment, and asserts that he has no choice.

All of this is just the groundwork for the story that unfolds, and it’s a lot—Bassam Tariq works his own miracle by getting all of these characters to cross paths organically. Latif is a seasoned and skilled hand-to-hand fighter, who has created his own “code” in which he never uses guns and only uses knifes. Why is never made fully clear, but it makes for some great action sequences. It’s worth noting that, aside from the opening bathroom sequence, it’s a while before any real action takes place. The action in this film is exceptional but used sparingly and therefore with unique effectiveness. We really get to know these characters, which raises the stakes far higher than your average action movie.

In the midst of all this, Latif is having a crisis of faith—something clearly suspected by his most trusted elder at his mosque, Abdul (Giancarlo Esposito, finally in a role in which he is barely recognizable). But this is where I get into some ambivalence with Your Mother Your Mother, which takes a turn into the supernatural in the final act—something that ultimately connects Latif and Pastor Hwan in a surprising way. I still can’t decide how I feel about it. I prefer my tales of crises of faith to be ambiguous, and this film takes a sharp turn into the opposite.

On the other hand, it could be said that this is one for the Muslims: Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is a single dot of American cinema with a broadly positive depiction of Islam in a vast history of film that villainized Muslims by default. This is a story about flawed people, not a flawed religion. Granted, that is where my ambivalence comes in, because as an atheist I believe all religion is flawed. I also know I am in the minority on this, and I still champion fair depictions onscreen. Fair representation is one thing, though; telling a story in which something that appears to be an outright miracle occurs is quite another.

Whether it still works for the purposes of the storytelling here is something reasonable people can debate. It just took it a step into the realm of the ridiculous for me, but that doesn’t change how expertly crafted this movie is. The acting is exceptional across the board, and especially impressive on the part of the young actors playing Latif’s children. It’s probably worth noting that this story is very specifically about American Muslims, which might account for the degree of religious tolerance they have. They live in a country in which they have no choice but to coexist with other religions, after all.

In any case, until that turn at the end, which was clearly what Tariq was leading up to all along, I was super into it. Perhaps it’s a parable, or a morality play, and I’m open to these interpretations—I don’t even begrudge the many who have only good things to say about this remarkable film. I may not have been moved by faith the way the characters were, but I was still moved by this movie.

A father sits in, for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.

Overall: B+

HOPE

Directing: C
Acting: B
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: C+
Special Effects: B-

I had such high hopes for . . . well, you know. I was genuinely excited to see this movie, and then walked away disappointed. At the ending, such as it was, I was completely baffled.

What does writer-director think this is, Dune Part One? Sort of, in a way: he reportedly has a script all ready to go for a sequel that he hopes to be part of a trilogy, depending on this film’s success. And what if there never is a sequel? Hope ends so abruptly that I actually said out loud, “What?” And this was after two and a half hours of non-stop armed pursuit of what gradually are revealed to be not just one, but multiple aliens in Hope Harbor, a small South Korean town very close to the Demiitarized Zone.

With a runtime this long, I expected Hope to take its time a bit—which it does, for the first twenty minutes or so, after which it’s fairly effective non-stop tension or action. Na Hong-jin employs a lot of economical filmmaking, clearly saving money on effects shots by having his characters pursue an unseen “monster” that is constantly on another block or out of frame. The many scenes with production design of massive destruction is impressively detailed, but I kept wondering why the town is so quiet and deserted. Apparently it’s mostly elderly people who live here, but you’d think there would still be a lot of panicked screaming and running in the streets. Instead, we get destroyed streets with dead and maimed bodies here and there, with no set pieces involving any more than just a handful of extras.

The camera follows police chief Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) as he follows the trail of an evident monster through the town, gun in hand and terrified. In the beginning, there is a dead cow found in the middle of a road, and the wounds indicate something very large having attacked it. There is speculation as to whether it’s a rogue tiger. But as Bum-seok and assorted others pursue it, at first there is some logic in the idea that whatever it is needs to be killed before it starts killing everyone in town. Never mind the fact that the whole population of the town seems to be gone already—something I could not stop thinking about—but the longer Bum-seok pursues this thing, the clearer it becomes that it is unnaturally gigantic, and he is no match for it. Neither are any of his cohorts, and nor really any of the guns or ammo they possess. And still they persist. Why? I would be thinking about was a place to hide.

Eventually this creature wreaking havoc on the town appears onscreen, and I can hardly convey the depths of my disappointment. It really just looks like a weirdly agile, gigantic cartoon man. I thought this was supposed to be an alien? Indeed it is, we discover soon enough, but another group of men is exploring the forest outside of town, and the more they discover the weirder everything gets. I’m okay with plot twists revealing more questions than answers, but Hope offers no answers whatsoever, just an Escher painting of endless questions, which I found very frustrating.

I really couldn’t tell if Na Hong-jin was just drawing inept characters with cliched mindsets for his own amusement, or if there was some kind of commentary going on. It’s clear to the viewers very quickly that fighting these aliens with guns is ineffective, and not once does it ever occur to a single one of them to try a different approach. Not even after the aliens pick them up and throw them against buildings or trees, or in some cases whack one of them with the hurled body of another. No matter what happens, even after Ko Bum-seok finds himself briefly feeling sorry for the first creature, it’s the same tactic: guns, guns, guns. Na Hong-jin must be going for something a little deeper here, because more than once a person is asked, “Where did you get all these guns?” and the reply is always a variation on “That’s not important right now!”

Over time we find out these aliens aren’t quite what they seem, although none of the characters register this deeply enough to interrogate things like, say, motivation. Actually, Ko Bum-seok thinks about this briefly, one time, and then never brings it up again. He’s too busy angrily shooting at aliens with ineffective bullets. Eventually the movie tells us way more about the aliens than the characters ever discover, but in a way that answers nothing and just leaves us bewildered.

Perhaps the sequel script is designed to dole out some of these deeply desired answers, but after sitting through Hope, I half expect another installment to be just another series of narrative rabbit holes. This movie feels like it’s trying to be some kind of thrilling setup, but instead it’s a series of set pieces that have their share of thrills but collectively amount to nothing more than “Huh?”

I also can’t decide whether I might have liked Hope better if it had better—or at the very least more consistent–special effects. The very first alien creature looks like cheap CGI. Later ones have some surprisingly impressive renderings but then look like they’re in an outdated video game as they move and run. There are some very different creature shapes seen, with some clues as to how they are related to each other but with other examples of differences that have no clear relationship to each other. Much of Hope feels like a lot of ideas thrown at the wall, by an author who is just hoping to come up with ways to make them click together later. For now, how about we just abruptly roll credits!

Very early in the film, we see a sign that references keeping out “infiltrators,” a clear reference to North Koreans. It feels like the suggestion of some kind of commentary, as does a lot in Hope, which are either never more than suggestions or are getting lost in translation. Is it possible that Hope somehow actually succeeds and I just don’t get it? Sure. Is this a movie that simply has no hope of working for me? Absolutely.

I really wanted to see what was around that corner, until I did.

Overall: C+

MUTINY

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

Jason Statham and Gerard Butler should get together and do a movie about a survivalist ex-military man seeking vengeance against terrorists in the middle of a natural disaster. These guys have never worked together, but they have worked with multiple same directors: Ric Roman Waugh (Greenland, Shelter); Jean-François Richet (Plane, Mutiny). So what are they waiting for?

The idiocy of Greenland: Migration (also directed by Waugh) notwithstanding, I seem to have a thing for these guys’ movies—quite literal B-movies in every respect, I tend to give them solid B grades (spoiler alert: it’s what I give Mutiny), because they are exactly what they state themselves to be, and thus solidly deliver on expectations. Mutiny is merely the latest in a line of these, the second by Statham this year alone, after Shelter. Last year we got A Working Man (the weakest of this recent stretch—not quite a B for that one); the year before that, the one that launched this stretch of Statham movies and still my favorite (albeit also getting a solid B): The Beekeeper.

I do wish the rest of these movies were more like The Beekeeper: self-aware, sprinkled with effective humor, leaning into its own preposterousness. I liked Mutiny a bit more than I expected, but was still slightly disappointed at its self-seriousness. We’re all here to see Jason Statham shoot a bunch of bad guys in the head, I get it, but would it hurt to make it a little more fun? I guess Statham is just cranking these out for a regular paycheck, and I don’t begrudge him that. I suppose my plea is more for the directors and writers. Beekeeper writer Kurt Wimmer has not written any of these other movies, and someone needs to pick up the phone and call him again. Apparently he wrote The Beekeeper 2, coming out next year, so that’s promising, at least.

As for Mutiny, I’ll give Jean-François Richet credit for pacing, and maybe most surprising of all, restraint. There is plenty of engaging action in this movie, but it’s not wall-to-wall with it; we actually get some semblance of a story. Statham’s ex-cop, Cole Reed, has been working for shipping company magnate Tibu Campallo (Ramon Tikaram) for five years, and they’ve become close friends. Reed is even declared “family” by Campallo, who is retiring and handing the company off to his son, Kameron Campallo (Chaneil Kular). While Reed is driving Tibu home, they are ambushed—the first exciting action sequence in the film—and the rest of the film follows Reed’s quest for vengeance against the perpetrators.

Most of this happens on a container ship, making Mutiny feel like Captain Phillips if it were a dumb action movie. It’s not like we’ve never seen action sequences among shipping containers before, but having it be the setting of three quarters of the movie does lend it a small bit of novelty. We also get one female lead, Angie Ellis (Annabelle Wallis), a KMG employee forced to report to this ship at the last minute who is evidently the only crew member not in on the whole human trafficking scheme that is ultimately revealed. As the sole female principal cast member, Mutiny is far from passing the Bechdel test, but I’ll give the movie points for not putting romance anywhere in the story, and for making Ellis herself an ex-Navy woman who is more than capable and never needs saving.

So really, we get to watch Statham and Wallis kick a bunch of guys’ asses for a bit more than an hour, all on a container ship. It’s what I expected from this movie, it’s what I wanted, and it’s what it gave me. There’s also the primary villain in the ship’s captain, Marko Madsen (Roland Møller), who might be taking orders from a guy orchestrating all this, but he’s also the guy we all know Statham will have a final, climactic square-off with. Sure, this could just be called “Die Hard on a container ship,” but formulas are followed because they work.

It’s when people try to get too cute or complicated with formulas when they stop working. That’s where these movies smartly refuse to go. They are clearly mid-tier, mid-budget, and employ mid-level movie stars, but a movie like Mutiny is truly making the most of what it has to work with, sometimes slightly clever with its action sequences but never getting out over its skis with that cleverness. Statham’s final hand-to-hand battle is not wildly inventive, but is just inventive enough, as with the rest of the movie, to keep you inching closer to the edge of your seat. It’s why I keep going to these movies, even though they aren’t great—they’re not just good enough, but consistently so. If “working class action” is its own subgenre, Jason Statham was born to play in it.

Okay, fine: this makes her look like a woman in need of protecting. Blame the people who selected available screen shots! These two are equally capable of kicking ass, take my word for it.

Overall: B

SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Special Effects: B

I can’t for the life of me figure out why there seems to be this unwritten rule these days that superhero movies need to be two and a half hours long. It’s bad enough we’re all obligated to sit through the credits in order to see a tacked-on scene at the end; they have to make the movie over-long as well? Side note: the post-credits “scene” in Spider-Man: Brand New Day is arguably the lamest moment in the movie. I really didn’t think it was worth waiting for.

Was the rest of the movie worth sitting through? I guess. It was fine. There’s something to be said for Tom Holland in the role that made him a star (and no other role he’s ever had came even close to having the same effect), and the undeniable chemistry that he has with Zendaya, one of the most gifted actors alive. There’s even a kind of comfort in seeing Jacob Batalon yet again as Peter Parker’s friend Ned, even though, like all of them, he is noticeably older, and there’s been an understandable about of chatter regarding how the dynamics of Spider-Man change when he and his friends are no longer teenagers. He even says at one point in this movie, “I’m not in high school anymore.”

It would seem, however, that Marvel Studios have backed themselves into a corner, with this insistence on connective tissue, even after their content has long since saturated the market. The Spider-Man character does have a kind of appeal that is broader than most other superheroes, and as series fourth-installments go, this one actually is pretty entertaining and charming. It’s also over-stuffed, with not just John Bernthal as The Punisher, but Florence Pugh as “Thunderbolt” Yelena Belova, here using a sauna as her office; Michael Mando as The Scorpion, a bit under-used; Tramell Tillman as Head of Department of Damage Control Bill Metzger; The Bear’s Tramell Tillman as Detective Jean DeWolff, who seems to serve as replacement for JK Simmons in the previous three films (The Daily Bugle doesn’t even get mentioned here); and even Marissa Tomei in enough flashback scenes to land her eighth-billing in the credits.

And none of those are even the primary villain in this movie, played by Sadie Sink, her character being apparently such a spoiler that I won’t name her here, even though it’s also widely known. Suffice it to say she serves as even more connective tissue for the broader MCU narrative going forward, in a way many Marvel fans are thrilled about and I’m just like: okay, whatever, fine. I will say it’s a fascinating pivot to see one of those movies have a tiny, 24-year-old young woman as one of the most powerful villains ever.

“Most powerful” is always relative, of course. Mark Ruffalo also returns as Bruce Banner, AKA The Hulk, who is evidently indestructible whenever he’s Hulking out. This has always been my problem with superhero movies, and Marvel movies in particular: the characters are effectively gods, which saps them of any need for emotional investment. At least Peter Parker is undergoing an evolution of his powers this time around, which leaves him unmoored and vulnerable. Somewhat ironically, this aspect of the store is also underdeveloped, because writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers—who also wrote all three of the previous Spider-Man movies—had to pack so much shit in there.

It’s worth noting that the first three Spider-Man movies were all released two years apart: 2017, 2019, and 2021. I found the first two to be pretty generic superhero movies, but the third one, No Way Home, ran with the “Spider-verse” concept and became a cultural moment the likes of which Marvel had not seen since 2019 in Avengers: Endgame, and has not seen again since. And it’s been five years—half a decade—since No Way Home was released. That movie was a pretty spectacular climax a trilogy that would have been well served to be left alone; Brand New Day was reportedly intended to be the first in a new trilogy. Holland is a charismatic performer, but how many of these movies do we need? Not counting other Marvel movies the character appeared in, there have now been 11 of these movies in the past 24 years.

All this is to say, Brand New Day is at multiple disadvantages. In addition to how much older Peter Parker is, it’s inevitably a bit of a comedown after the thrill of how surprisingly well-constructed No Way Home was. Brand New Day will make a shit ton of money, which is precisely why they keep making these movies, but it never had any hope of living up to what came before it. So, it evidently doesn’t even try. There’s nothing especially clever about the story here, and getting back to the point of its excessive run time, it makes the inevitable mistake of engaging far too long with chaotic, CGI-fight battles. The visual effects aren’t terrible in this movie, but neither are they great.

It’s the cast that elevates the material. Holland and Zendaya are plainly irresistible screen presences, and most of the rest of the cast have complentary charisma (though I must admit The Punisher as a character does little for me). This is a movie that isn’t anything special, but neither does it disappoint. I got about what I expected out of it. I suppose enough other people will feel the same way to justify its existence.

Why don’t you just straight up rip off Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse while you’re at it?

Overall: B

DISCLOSURE DAY

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A
Special Effects: B

Look, I reserve the right to change my opinion of Disclosure Day over time. I’m seeing it again next week; perhaps my opinion will evolve. After first watch, I found it riveting from start to finish, but I thought the aliens looked kind of dumb. Thankfully their cumulative screen time is mercifully brief.

As is always the case with Steven Spielberg, this movie is much more about the people—as in, the human people. Tonally, Disclosure Day is like a cross between Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Spielberg’s 2005 take on War of the Worlds—a flawed movie that I still return to every few years. (It is perhaps worth noting that the War of the Worlds aliens from 21 years ago looked better than these ones do.) Disclosure Day isn’t perfect either, but it spoke to me in a way Spielberg has not managed in a very long time, perhaps not since the 2001 science fiction extravaganza Minority Report.

Still, it’s easy to find things to be ambivalent about in this movie, and while I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call it polarizing, one can anticipate a degree of mixed reviews. The special effects, frankly, are not up to Spielberg’s usual standards. Some of the effects shots in the trailers, out of context, look worse than they come off while watching the film—but you can still see the CGI of it all. It would be one thing if the animals that appear out of nowhere to sort of mesmerize a couple of the lead characters were always part of a hallucination or a flashback of memory, but there are instances of this where we are meant to take it as occurring in their present reality.

And I really have to criticize the aliens themselves. Spielberg is clearly using the prototypical alien form from as far back as the forties as a reference. But, there are shots in which these guys just look like beanpole children in rubber costumes. There’s a shot in the final sequence that for me, pushes against the line of ridiculous; others might reasonably feel it crosses that line.

It’s a testament to the writing, by both David Koepp (who has written a great many great movies, including four previous Spielberg films) and Spielberg himself, that I am easily able to overlook these things. Ditto the direction, and also the phenomenal editing by Sarah Broshar (another frequent Spielberg collaborator). Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography is very good but not at quite the same level; there are a bit too many lens flares, and one major nitpick is the shot of a crowd of people recording through a window with their smart phone lights on—they would just be recording the light reflecting in the glass. It makes for a cool, haunting image, though.

Janusz Kaminski is yet another frequent Spielberg collaborator, and that seems to be a major theme here. Much of Disclosure Day is a revisit, of sorts, to ground he’s covered before. To its credit, it also looks forward, and although it hardly gets into the weeds, it has some pretty provocative philosophical questions to pose, and this is a big part of what elevates it. Should we be keeping proof of extraterrestrial life secret because we fear aliens, or because we fear how people will handle it? (There was one scene in which I thought: if this were the real world, some idiot would just whip out a gun and shoot that thing.) What kind of impact would proof of aliens have on global religious consciousness? These are things that characters in the film actually talk about, and we get very reasonable arguments from multiple sides.

Now, it’s on the record that Spielberg himself is convinced that aliens walk among us, and this is a perspective that clearly informs his approach to this film. My reaction to that is: that’s cute. The adorable old man thinks aliens on Earth are real! The idea is of course preposterous on its face. If any evidence actually did exist, it would have been leaked eons ago. There’s a throwaway line in this movie about how U.S. presidents are kept in the dark since they are civilians again eight years after being in office, and that explains how they are kept in the dark, and gives an out for speculation regarding the unnamed current president. The thing is, presidents still stack agencies with people who are just as moronic as they are, and it’s silly to think anything this huge could ever be kept secret by hundreds or maybe even thousands of people with knowledge of it. It’s mathematically impossible.

It sure makes a great movie, though. Conspiracies are typically ludicrous in the real world, but they make for great thrillers, and Disclosure Day is indeed a great one. Even better, it’s fantastically cast: Colin Firth is a government agent on the tail of Josh O’Connor on the run with the government secrets he’s spent a decade being paid to protect, and they both slip into their roles organically—as does Eve Hewson as O’Connor’s girlfriend, who is having a crisis of faith in the face of the information being shared. The standout, though, is Emily Blunt, as the Kansas City TV news meteorologist who suddenly finds herself uttering a click-like laguage nearly no one can understand, and occasionally slipping into Russian or Korean. She gradually discovers other abilities that I won’t reveal here, except to say that they provide a delightful mix of mysterious and comic moments alike. Blunt’s performance, as a relatable middle-aged woman confused by suddenly extraordinary circumstances, arguably makes Disclosure Day worth seeing on its own. Colman Domingo, on the other hand, is a a great actor underused as a guy who spends most of his screen time on the phone with one or another of the other characters.

For all I know, maybe one day I will find the writing in Disclosure Day less impressive and the visual effects somehow more sensible. All I know is, I look forward to seeing it again, and I look forward to being able to discuss it with people. This is a movie that grabs you from its opening shot, from the point of view of a professional wrestler stomped in the face. Within moments, we see O’Connor’s whistleblower character nervously sitting in the crowd, already on the run. Disclosure Day does not waste a moment, and is so well edited that its 145 minutes pass swiftly. This is action-thriller filmmaking at its finest, not a narrative sag in sight. It occasionally invites nitpicking, but that’s relatively inconsequential considering how high it’s flying when the story soars, and I felt like I was windsurfing on its intrigue the entire time.

To be perfectly Blunt

Overall: A-

STAR WARS: THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU

Directing: B
Acting: B-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B

Gather around, younglings. Let me tell you of a time very different from the one we currently live in. A time when a new Star Wars feature film release elicited palpable excitement. I’m not even talking about the prehistoric times of 1999, 2002, and 2005, when the Prequel Trilogy caused a global sensation in anticipation alone—only to disappoint millions (and yet delight viewers who were as young then as we were when the Original Trilogy was released). I’m talking just last decade—as recently as 2019, the appearance of the Lucasfilm Ltd logo elictited whoops from audiences. It’s worth noting that that was a full seven years after Disney bought Lucasfilm. But, it was at the end of their wildly misguided choice to flood the market with five feature films in as many years.

When I sat down to watch The Mandalorian and Grogu in a local theater, it was the first time I experienced that opening Lucasfilm Ltd logo and found it met with . . . silence. Everyone’s tired now. Star Wars is your parents’ franchise. The heyday has long since passed.

And yet: in a way, this helps The Mandalorian and Grogu, which is about as much fun as you can hope for with a feature film based on a television series, which was itself part of a broad franchise universe. It leans too heavily on action and is light on character development, but I have to say, most of the time the action is a blast.

There are many who act as though a lot is riding on this movie, and I’m not really convinced of that. I went in hoping for a good time that had no promise and no need to reinvent the wheel (or hyperdrive), and that’s precisely what I got. Perhaps more importantly, it gives a ton of screen time to that achingly cute character once known as “Baby Yoda” but whose name is actually Grogu, and it turns out that cuteness goes a long way. Even with a ton of screen time, Grogu never overstays his welcome. (For his part, Pedro Pascal gets one sequence without his all-important helmet on; they can’t have a star in one of the title roles without ever showing his money maker.) Having four new Anzellans, the small humanoid creatures who specialize in fixing things, doesn’t hurt either. The Anzellan Babu Frik was the best thing in The Rise of Skywalker, otherwise the one Star Wars movie to get worse with each viewing, and we didn’t get enough of him. We get plenty more of his kind in The Mandalorian and Grogu and it is always welcome.

All that said, there are elements of The Mandalorian and Grogu that are a bit of a mixed bag—namely, some of the casting. It’s bad enough that the opening sequence features several throwaway characters giving genuinely bad line readings, but this may be the worst I have ever seen Sigourney Weaver perform onscreen. It’s as though they just used the first take for every line she delivered, apparently having learned them just beforehand. How many science fiction franchises does Sigourney Weaver need to be in, anyway? Are Alien and Avatar not enough? Now she’s not only getting greedy, but apparently getting lazy. She genuinely feels out of place here.

The character around whom the plot turns is Rotta the Hut, a CGI character voiced by Jeremy Allen White, in a deepened voice that renders it unrecognizable. In which case, what was the point of casting him? At least Martin Scorsese’s voice is recognizable as Hugo Durant, a monkey-like character with four arms, odd a casting choice as that may be.

It’s somewhat of a miracle that Pedro Pascal is one of the few characters whose actual face we almost never see but who doesn’t seem like he’s phoning it in. Just as had been the case in the television series (but it should be stressed: you need not have seen the TV show to understand or enjoy this movie), there remains a delightful chemistry between him and the tiny puppet character—thank all the gods in the galaxy they never pivoted to rendering him fully in CGI—and that is truly the engine of this story, the reason to watch.

The Mandalorian and Grogu offers nothing particularly new, it doesn’t move the franchise forward in any real way, but it does prove it’s still viable. People may not be excited about this movie the way they were with previous ones, but this movie makes it easy to imagine one coming along that captures the public’s imagination again. Given the indelible nature of both the Mandalorian and Grogu as characters, it could easily be argued that this is better than Solo: A Star Wars Story, which made the mistake of making a Han Solo movie without Harrison Ford in it. The Mandalorian and Grogu has more potential for lasting impact, and is a fairly effective palate cleanser even seven years after The Rise of Skywalker squandered all the thrilling potential that came with The Last Jedi.

I do find myself curious about the way they title these movies. It feels a little like Lucasfilm backed themselves into a corner by retroactively making all official titles of any film in a trilogy start with the words “Star Wars,” and then making the subtitle to all standalone films “A Star Wars Story.” Except this new one is a standalone story and its official title is apparently Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu. Are they just sticking with “Star Wars” as the beginning of all feature films now and scrapping “A Star Wars Story”? Make up your minds!

The Mandalorian and Grogu heralds a clearly transitional time in Star Wars franchise history, which has had high highs and low lows, and a few movies, like this one, which are just fine. I kind of wish some of the special effects were better; occasionally movement onscreen is weirdly jerky. Other times, the picture rendered onscreen is stunning. Rotta the Hut is pretty standard-looking as CGI characters go, which qualifies as a disappointment: Star Wars is supposed to stand apart in these areas. If it’s not exceptional with its visual effects, how can it be exceptional at all?

Thankfully, none of these things drag the movie down to any fatal measure. The truth is, in spite of its clear flaws, I genuinely had a blast watching this movie. I got a good many laughs out of it, and I can easily imagine enjoying subsequent viewings. It doesn’t feature a story with enough depth to make it a new classic, but it holds its own among the other decent offerings in the franchise.

This far into a franchise’s history, this movie gives us just enough of exactly what we want.

Overall: B

NORMAL

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

I guess Normal is an apropos title for a movie like this, in spite of how clearly it wants to present itself as a curio. The writing is pat throughout; there are turns you can see coming a mile away; this is a movie that could have been made by countless interchangeable filmmakers. And yet? I actually had a good time. With a movie like this, as long as it’s not actively bad, all you need is to give yourself over to all that it aspires to be, which is honestly not much more than mindless entertainment, and you find yourself having a blast.

This is hardly even the first B-grade action movie Bob Odenkirk has done—that would have been the surprisingly fun 2021 film Nobody, in which he established himself as an unlikely, aged action hero, this generation’s Liam Neeson. The kind of funny thing is that Neeson and Odenkirk are 10 years apart in age, yet Neeson’s late-career action period started with Taken in 2008, when he announced to the world at age 56 that he had “a very particular set of skills.” Alas, when Odenkirk reasserted himself as an action hero at the age of 59, he wasn’t gifted with lines anywhere near as famous.

He pulled in a $57.5 million worldwide box office on that movie, though—chump change compared to Taken’s $226.8 million gross, sure, but it’s good to keep in mind that Nobody was released when covid was still keeping audiences out of theaters, its gross was on a $16 million budget. It came as little surprise, then, when—just like with Taken—Nobody 2 was released four years later, in 2025. Alas, it proved to be diminishing returns; that movie wasn’t even that good of a time.

Thus, I somewhat feared that Normal would continue that downward trajectory, given that it clearly exists square in the same vein as the Nobody movies: an older guy who proves surprisingly adept against violently challenging odds. In this case, Odenkirk plays Ulysses Richardson, who has been hired as interim Sheriff after the previous one died of supposed cardiac arrest in the freezing Minnesota winter. The town where he reports to work is called Normal, because of course it is, and something predictably sinister is going on there.

The most surprising part of Normal is the extent to which the Japanese Yakuza figures into the story—the opening scene is in Yokyo, and for a minute I thought maybe I had wandered into the wrong movie. How this ties into the town of Normal is a bit unnecessarily convoluted, and I have mixed feelings about the universally one-dimensional way in which every single Japanese character in this film is written.

I won’t spoil how the Yakuza turn out to be connected with this town, except to say that it gives director Ben Wheatley and script writer Derek Kolstad (Odenkirk himself is also given story credit) an excuse to treat the locals in a way similar to the townspeople of the 2007 Edgar Wright film Hot Fuzz, albeit with far less wit. I will admit to being well amused by a whole lot that happens in Normal, but it tended to be more because of the cleverly over-the-top violence (at times it gets about halfway toward Cocaine Bear, which I really dug), not because of any particularly well-written dialogue.

There are multiple characters, in fact, who are weirdly underused. The inciting incident is an attempted bank robbery by a young couple, played by Reena Jolly and Brendan Fletcher, but that was evidently the only thing these characters were created for. I was relatively compelled by them, especially when Ulysses finds himself needing to team up with them, but their departure from the story is weirdly anticlimactic. I really hoped they would return to be part of the inevitable climactic battle, nut, no such luck. And then there’s the always-welcome Henry Winkler as Mayor Kibner, who is dispatched shockingly early in the film.

But as long as Odenkirk is onscreen, you’re having some fun. He clearly has fun making these movies, and as long as he’s getting paid, more power to him I guess. It feels a bit like there’s a threshold of sort to these films, which need to have a magic balance of dumbness and cleverness, a sensibility that is at least partly self-aware and a refusal to take themselves too seriously. These sorts of movies are a very particular brand of stupid, but the better ones have a delicate knack for effective entertainment. Normal just barely tips into the better side of them.

Another example of effectively dumb fun.

Overall: B

THEY WILL KILL YOU

Directing: B-
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-

There are multiple things I don’t understand about They Will Kill You, but the thing I understand the least is the decision to release it all of one week after Ready or Not: Here I Come, which broadly speaking might as well be the same movie. They Will Kill You is even more similar to Ready or Not: Here I Come than to its 2019 predecessor, Ready or Not, which was the only one of these movies that was a morbidly delightful surprise. That movie’s sequel, and this movie, are both about a pair of sisters being hunted in an enclosed space by a large group of violent Satanic cultists. I find myself wondering if one of these movies should sue the other.

Still, I really wanted They Will Kill You to be better. I came for what the marketing promised: creatively cartoonish violence. I should admit that this film does deliver that, for a time anyway—I’m not sure the possessed pig’s head in the climactic sequence really worked. It was effectively gross, I’ll give it that.

The best thing I can say about this movie is that Zazie Beetz is the lead, and she has a very charismatic screen presence. This is her first lead role, and she carries it well. I wish I could say the woman who plays her sister, Myha'la, is as compelling, but in her defense, the writing doesn’t give her much to work with. I’m a little bit at a loss with what passes for a plot in this movie—movies that exist just to showcase fun violence don’t have to be deep, certainly, but they can be better than this. Honestly, Zazie Beetz is better than this. And between this and last month’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, I fear she may start getting typecast as a woman who is better than the movies she’s in. Someone needs to send her a movie script that’s actually good.

Much of the rest of the cast in They Will Kill You punches above its weight, though. Perhaps most significantly, we get Patricia Arquette as Lily Woodhouse, the elevated superintendant and cult leader at The Virgil, the 100-year-old Manhattan building Beetz’s Asia Reeves arrives at to start a job as a maid. She arrives soaking wet without a coat in a nighttime downpour, by the way. Why would that happen? We are never told. But hey, it gives the “plot” an excuse to get Asia quickly into a shower, next to which someone writes THEY WILL KILL YOU into the fog on the mirror.

Lily is also the matriarch of a family, of sorts, with “very special needs,” as she puts it—there’s a reason they must offer a sacrifice to their Dark Lord every night, and tonight Asia is meant to be the offering. Among the family, which also double as bumbling henchmen in the face of a woman who learned how to fight hard while in prison, is Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy himself), and Heather Graham.

You could say that all of these established actors are slumming it in a movie like this, but no one’s going to begrudge anyone having a lot of fun—especially when they’re getting paid to do it. That said, you can only see characters get dismembered and spray blood like they’re in a low-rent Kill Bill so many times before it starts to lose its luster. The action choreography in They Will Kill You is actually pretty good; I would argue it’s even better than in Ready or Not: Here I Come. It’s the writing, and the pointless backstory about these sisters, that’s the problem. They Will Kill You saw how undercooked the sisters’ relationship was in Ready or Not: Here I Come and said, “Hold my beer.”

They Will Kill You even begins ten years before the majority of the action that takes place, with Beetz still playing Asia but a different, younger actor playing her sister, Maria. They are on the run from an apparently abusive father, though the only evidence we get of that onscreen is a really large man stomping through a convenience store looking for them. A shooting occurs but the dad lives, and manages to keep hold of Maria; Asia panics and runs, and now it’s ten years later and she’s come back for Maria after hearing she’s been seen at this Virgil building, where some shit is going down that has nothing to do with any of that.

And with a movie like this, do we need any of that? It would be far more effective to throw us right into the action, and start with Asia’s arrival at The Virgil. There’s a very strange element to this film’s narrative where it tries too hard and somehow the result is a feeling like it’s been phoned in. I was moderately entertained by this movie, but in better hands it could have been a blast. Instead, it feels like a copy of a copy.

Overall: C+

SHELTER

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

Much like Gerard Butler in his B-movie quality disaster flicks, Jason Statham has really carved out his niche in January-release action thrillers. It all started with the surprisingly fun The Beekeeper, which set the standard in 2024 thanks to its self-awareness as revenge trash, which somehow made it good. Now, last year’s A Working Man failed to meet that standard by being far too self-serious and thereby sucking out any chance of fun. (Also that one was actually released in March, but its original release date before being postponed was in January so I’ve decided it counts. Plus it still very much has that forgettable-January-action-thriller vibe. It should have been released in January.) With Shelter, we get a movie that sits kind of in the middle: it’s not as self-aware or quite as fun as The Beekeeper, but neither is it as gravely self-serious as A Working Man. It does have its comedic moments, thanks to a charming performance by a 14-year-old Bodhi Rae Breathnach. This plus Statham’s typical no-nonsense violence makes Shelter just compelling enough.

2026 is shaping up to be a banner year for early releases that are far better than anyone would reasonably expect them to be. Sam Raimi’s Send Help is the best example of this and the one film of this ilk most deserving of recommendation, but Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple would also qualify. Shelter is perhaps the weakest of these examples by just a slight margin, but it could also be argued that it makes the strongest case for delivering exactly what you expect of it. In any case, January and February have long been referred to as “Dumpuary” for good reason, but some filmmakers are figuring out how to make movies that fit into the genres usually reserved for this time of year but that are also actually good.

To be fair, Shelter is hardly great, but no one is expecting greatness from it, which is a key element of movies made not just simply to entertain, but to entertain simply. Statham’s previous two films featured his protagonist characters on a revenge quest, but this time director Ric Roman Waugh (who, as it happens, also directed the original Gerard Butler B-movie disaster flick Greenland) and writer Ward Parry give him a new twist this year: he’s still on a quest, but now he’s aiming to protect her from a British government that considers her a “loose end” in the framing of him as a former shadow MI6 agent.

The story and character motivations are pretty simple. Mason (Statham) has been exiled on a remote island, in hiding from a government that won’t forgive him for refusing to kill an innocent man who had worked as an informant. A man who once served with him regularly brings supplies out to him from the mainland, and has started bringing his niece, Jesse (Breathnach), along with him. And this is how Mason and Jesse meet, as she delivers the crates of supplies by rowboat from the main boat to the shore, but gets stranded on the island with him thanks to a severe rainstorm. A surprising amount of time is spent on these two alone on the island together, as Mason helps nurse Jesse’s injured ankle back to health. But when Mason is forced to take a boat to the mainland himself in order to get needed medical supplies, the British government’s far-ranging surveillance state picks him up on one of the infinite number of cameras they have access to (in this case, in the background of a TikTok video—topical!). And now, with the government alerted to his location, they descend upon the island, and this is when the action can kick into high gear.

But, does it? I’ll be fair and say there is plenty of action on Shelter, but given the kind of movie this is, I kind of wanted a little more. This movie lingers on its quiet periods a bit more than necessary. This clearly isn’t high art, so let’s just get on with what we’ve come here for. That said, a lot of the violence that does happen is pretty problematic—Shelter is wildly cavalier about collateral damage. It never seems to matter to Mason that the people he’s attacking often likely have no idea that he doesn’t really deserve what they’re attempting to do to him, and he dispatches countless numbers of them, like Star Trek “red shirts.” There is one singular villain in the hired assassin (Bally Gill) sent to kill both Mason and Jesse by the head of the shadow group Mason was once a part of (played by Bill Nighy), and we do get one moment when Mason asks him, in the middle of their climactic fight, “Do you even know why you’re doing this?” His answer: “It doesn’t matter.” Oh, he must have been reading the studio notes. This movie is less interested in providing Mason the answer to that question than in giving Mason a reason to kill everyone that gets in his way in cinematically clever ways.

I still enjoyed this movie, I want to make clear—again, it has no pretensions about what kind of movie it is. I did find it distracting how often a character would be driving a car and looking at the passenger, or at their phone, a recklessly long amount of time without looking at the road. This happens three or four times. Eyes on the road, people! I know you’re probably actually on a soundstage, but that’s no excuse.

These nitpicks would make Shelter far less fun to watch if not for the solid casting of Jason Statham, who was born to play these roles in his fifties, and Bodhi Rae Breathnach, who has easy chemistry with him (she also plays the older daughter in Hamnet, proving she has versatility as a young actor). Shelter isn’t going to blow anyone away or even exceed anyone’s expectations, but it will deliver on its promise as a B-grade action thriller.

You’ll root for this odd couple in an action movie that is just fine.

Overall: B

GREENLAND: MIGRATION

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Special Effects: B-

Watching Father Mother Sister Brother and Greenland: Migration back to back is quite the one-two punch of bad movies—wildly different in every conceivable way, except they are bad. Oh sure, they both have their few barely-redeeming elements—again, in completely different ways—but the unredeeming qualities easily weigh them down. I wonder how many other people in the world have watched these two particular movies right after each other? Surely it’s just a small handful. Well, I’ll say this much for Greenland: Migration: at least it kept me awake.

I’m dropping the “2,” by the way, because that’s how the title card reads in the film itself. Posters and promotional materials are listing it as Greenland 2: Migration, which I don’t understand, because the two words together and unbroken actually work as a phrase, as well as a direct reference to what happens in the film. It’s arguably the only sensible artistic choice made in the final cut. And now, our hero, John Garrity (Gerard Butler), his wife, Allison (Morena Baccarin), and their now-15-year-old son Nathan (Roma Griffin Davis—not the same actor who was in the first film) are forced out of the Greenland bunker they’ve been living in for the past five years by tectonic plates causing earthquakes that tear it apart. Over the course of this film’s 98 minutes of utter preposterousness, they make their way to Southern France, where they understand an impact crater has somehow become a shield to all the storms and radiation and is lush green with life. Nobody talks about how safe this spot is from more meteors, by the way.

We’re meant to feel for this family undergoing harrowing hardships, but honestly, all things considered, John Garrity is leading a straight-up charmed life. Oh sure, he barely escapes a tsunami that we see obliterate what’s left of Greenland (a visual high point in the film), and he encounters marauders, and he nearly falls to his death in a somehow dried-up English Channel, among other things. But also, nearly every step of the way, the Garritys encounter some kind-hearted soul willing to help them out. Someone is always coming along to help them through whatever scrape they’re in, far more than would ever realistically occur in an actual post-apocalyptic wasteland. But we’re not here to think about that, we’re here to be entertained.

They even pick up a very pretty teenage French girl along the way (Nelia Da Costa), and director Ric Roman Waugh (Angel Has Fallen) is surprisingly subtle about how we definitely need these two beautiful teens to start making beautiful babies. Maybe part 3 in this franchise can be called Greenland: Copulation. It wouldn’t be any less ridiculous than anything we see in Migration, which is easily the dumbest movie I have seen in recent memory.

There’s a peculiar quality to Greenland: Migration, that almost saves it, this sense that it barely takes itself too seriously. This is not a movie that is “in on the joke,” which in a way makes it more fun. There are plenty of laughable moments that are not intended to be. There’s a death scene in which a callback to an earlier scene is used, where Nathan recites a prayer he previously questioned. Never mind that in the scene being referenced, John is burying the body of an expendable character who had been in the car with them, and I just thought: These guys just dodged a bunch of meteors. I would not be wasting time burying a body. To say this film is filled with lapses in logic would be an understatement. In another scene, when John has run out of bullets defending his family against marauders, Allison comes to the rescue with her own gun. The thing is, we have only ever seen John get handed a gun, so where the hell did Allison get hers? I guess she pulled it out of her ass. She never seemed uncomfortable sitting on it, so color me impressed.

I should note that I am hardly the only person being much harder on Greenland: Migration than I was on the original Greenland, which was originally scheduled for release in 2020 but later released on VOD and which I did not watch myself until the VOD price went down, in February 2021. At that time, most of us were still working from home if we had jobs where that was possible, covid was still an actively scary thing, and a movie like this provided welcome escapist entertainment, even if it was a bit darker than most disaster movies. It didn’t hurt that it was relatively well paced and was better than most might have expected, particularly on a $35 million budget.

Well, Greenland: Migration had two and a half times the budget, and it is markedly worse. This time, it isn’t better than expected—it quite squarely meets expectations, and that’s not really a compliment. Gerard Butler pivoted into a full-time career of these B-movie disaster or action vehicles, several of which have actually been fun on their own terms, but we’ve reached the point where we’re getting diminishing returns even in that context.

So here’s the key difference between Greenland and Greenland: Migration. The first film used its special effects sparingly and effectively, and this film leans so much harder into the effects that their still-limited budget is even more apparent. This could have been a compelling survivalist drama if the script weren’t so deeply stupid, which means that even with what tools they had available, they could have at least entertained us with more thrilling set pieces. The greenland tsunami that we see is very early in the film, and the most thrilling sequence in it. It’s all downhill from there. Or rather, across the Atlantic Ocean, through a flooded Liverpool and a dried-out English Channel (someone explain this to me), and across war-ravaged France from there. There is a meteor shower that recalls the coolest action in the first film that’s relatively thrilling, if brief.

But in the end, something so dumb occurs that I covered my faces with my hands while saying “Oh my god.” This film has an earnestness that has no self-awareness, which makes it amusing in its way. I laughed several times. And now I can check this one off my list, and never watch it again.

I am stunned too. By how dumb this is.

Overall: C+